Today he is acknowledged by some readers and critics as a Jewish Objectivist poet in the tradition of Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky.
His critical book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction’s Net of Branches, received the Di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America.
His is a style and gesture seen as joining personal tone with historic incident while reflecting on such themes as the nature of language, poetry, religion, and even memory itself.
They address Heller's on-going dialogue and confrontation with such major figures as Williams, Pound, Stevens, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, Robert Duncan, Lorine Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke, and Mallarmé, along with poets in more contemporary modernist and postmodernist lineages.
Heller himself notes that: there is no question that the tenor of contemporary civilization is marked by its uncertainty, its hesitant mood on matters both cultural and political.